I’ve always felt that not having a feed from Wisconsin Kubb and USA Kubb were huge, huge gaps on the Planet Kubb feed. I even tried a couple of times to screen scrape the HTML off of those sites, but it proved too hard. This fills one of those huge holes. Yeah!

Hey @chad-b! The flow of the Planet Kubb feed is all about RSS. Many website content management systems create RSS — almost all blog packages do. Without RSS there isn’t a feed for me to pull into Planet Kubb. Any way that you can add RSS will allow me to add your new updates to the feed.

WordPress will output RSS formats all over the place. If you use WordPress to host it I know that I can get a feed, provided you have posts published and not just pages.

I would love to add Chippewa Valley to the list as well, however it looks like you only have a Facebook page right now? Facebook doesn’t reliably provide RSS output, and the “status update” format of Facebook doesn’t work well in the Planet Kubb World feed.

If you put up a site for the league, use something like WordPress so that it provides an RSS feed and I will put it in right away.

Another option is to use the new Planet Kubb Network option and host a league site using that. Let me know if that is interesting to you.

Most sports have scores and many even have a box score that shows the progression of the game. Baseball fans can look at a box score from a game and relive the game just looking at a series of numbers. We’ve been wanting to be able to do the same thing for Kubb for a long time but there wasn’t any standard system for recording a game. No standard notation system. This topic has been discussed here on Planet Kubb before and my goal was to get something that had a number of features:

An easy notation system using nothing but standard text.

The notation should be scalable so it works for games tracking player by player details, or simple for games with less detail.

Envision something that could be sent over Twitter so people could virtually watch a game turn by turn, tweet by tweet.

It should be language neutral so Kubb games can easily be shared globally.

Notation

2f/f/-/b/-/b

That string is a teams turn in a Kubb game. What happened? The first throw hit 2 field kubbs. The second hit a single field kubb. The third baton missed. Fourth hit a baseline kubb. Fifth missed. Sixth hit another baseline kubb.

We can extend this further.

jamie:2f/jamie:f/garrick:-/garrick:b/jamie:-/garrick:b

That is the same series of throws, but here the players name has been added in front of the action so we can generate player by player statistics. You can also see we threw this turn “Chad style“, each throwing 2 batons and reserving a final baton each for the end.

Those names are a bit long to type over and over though, so in real use we would use an initial.

j:2f/j:f/g:-/g:b/j:-/g:b

The notation system proposed here is very simple. The player notation is entirely optional. There are only a few symbols used. It’s very fast!

The scoresheet allows for some additional data that the notation system doesn’t handle, notably the Kubb drilling locations. The scoresheet has a miniature picture of the pitch and you can put a dot where the Kubbs land.

Game Statistics and Storage

If you have a game scoresheet you want to share it with everyone right? Even better, it would be great to know the statistics from the game. The Planet Kubb Wiki right now has a form that will allow anyone with an account to put a game into the wiki and it will then calculate statistics from the game as well as give a place to forever remember the game.

To really test this I used the video of the championship match at the 2012 Rockford Tournament. The match was between Tad Kubbler (Minneapolis) and Pitch Slap (Des Moines). You may know who won the match, but forget that for a moment and go relive the games. Click on each link below to see the scoresheet and statistics for each game.

I scored these games in realtime using the videos which had all the empty space cut out. This proved that the scoring system was definitely fast enough to score a game as it happens. The form on the wiki can handle an unlimited number of turns, they can be added as long as the game goes. The Planet Kubb Wiki is currently only calculating some very basic statistics for each game, mostly around batons thrown, hits and misses, advantage lines and baseline kubbs.

Putting these three games into the system was interesting. I was curious if the (primitive) statistics being calculated now would be interesting and they were!

Match 1 and 2 the teams hit kubbs 2 out of 3 throws. In match 3 the ratio drops to 1 in 2 throws.

In Match 1 Dobbie carries Pitch Slap through the game with Tony not hitting well. In Match 3 the roles flip and Tony carries Dobbie through the game.

The page for each of these games dumps all of it’s calculated data points raw. This is still very rough.

All of this work is licensed (like all Planet Kubb content) under Creative Commons BY-SA. Please share your feedback and we can all make this even more awesome!

It would be great to use these scoresheets on a number of games at Nationals this weekend!

I really want to hear from you all and what you think about this? What looks odd? What stats for games would you like to see? What do you think of the scoresheets? Does the notation make sense? What do you think?

If you want to try putting a game into the Wiki right now it’s easy, just make sure you are logged into the wiki and go to the game form. Put in a unique title for the game, something like “Kubb Friendly, Garrick v. Jamie, July 4 2012 (Game 1)”. All games must have a unique title.

Hey Jamie, Chad and I were talking about a score sheet just the other day. We said we should bring something with us to the Nationals. People would start wondering what we were doing after our throws. Great forms Jamie!!! Awesome work my friend

I also have a spreadsheet I built as a proof-of-concept for a complete stat tracking program for a college class I was taking. Using only kubb hits and kubbs thrown, it could tell you at any given point in the game how many kubbs were sanding on each baseline, in the field, and current percentages for all shots. A few of the DM people have seen the program that I named KITE (Kubb Interactive Tracking Engine).

That is a great idea @chrishodges — I added a section for “Games” in the sidebar with links to various game related stuff. Thanks for the suggestion.

Note that the form for entering the games and the templates that display the game output are really rough now. A lot could be done there to make it look really nice and show even more interesting data. This is just the start.

The example and full game example I think help a lot. The big thing added here is more flexibility and the notation was previously missing drills and advantage line indicators. There also was no way to indicate an illegal king hit (lose the game) — thanks @jakefreeberg for that catch.

I think this round is really, really solid. I also changed the output of the game form on the wiki to look more like the revised version. I really enjoyed the full game example. I can see how I would easily be able to reconstruct a game I never saw by looking at that.

Wondering if it would be a good idea to have a box at the top of the page to list players 1-6 (or thru 8?) for each team. Could save a little time on the shorthand to just call somebody “P3” rather than “Scott S.”

Another outlier situation to consider is the rescue – my opponent toppled 6 total kubbs, but with my first one I am rescuing a previously established field kubb I had left in play last turn. I take their Adv Line away (presumably), and am technically throwing 7 kubbs this round. Do you just update the Inkast box with the new number, or should there be an extra field to capture rescues?

Also, I’d really like to see that Inkast box get a little more robust, counting kubbs to start with, kubbs rescued, kubbs OOB once (rethrows), and penalty kubbs.